On Mon, 2 May 2011 16:36:28 -0700, "Steve B"
wrote:

Anyone qualify?

I went from first to fourth grade. My first year in public school, I was
treated like a leper, asking permission for every imaginable scenario
...................

SEAL training would be a cake walk after Catholic school.

Steve

Hah! Mary did 12 years of Catholic school. That can create obedient
subjects or build character. She was a quiet, gentle, generous
moral person of integrity who was impossible to intimidate and if
wronged or ****ed was quite capable of creative and effective
reciprocity.

Going with the SEAL reference, when she was being ravaged by an
incurable disease there was no way she would ring the bell. She stayed
the course with a positive attitude, happy heart and happy mind.
"Happy heart and mind" were her words, not mine. Her attitude was
immediately obvious and somewhat amazing to her care providors.

When I've read about people's "courageous fight" I always wondered
what that meant. How does one "courageously fight" a terminal disease
that's gonna eventually kill ya no matter what you do.

Now I understand. The courageously afflicted eventually die of their
disease, but they refuse to be defeated by it.

Now that I think about it, I guess we made that journey together as a
small team. My attitude was always positive too. Perhaps we enabled
each other. There was never a minute of gloomy foreboding. We even
discussed her eventual funeral on one of the rides down to Mayo, but
it was like an abstraction that wasn't going to happen anytime soon,
and there was humor in the exchange. I had no idea that it would
happen so shortly after that conversation. If she did, she concealed
it well.